Hello and welcome to the exit presented by flippa.com the number one platform to buy and sell online businesses flippa manages over a billion in deal value annually and combines expert buy and sell side advisory with its market leading valuation tool deal room off market offering market insights and AI based deal by deal matching engine now for the exit the exit is a 30 minute podcast featuring amazing entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it.

The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes you learn how they did it why they did it and get exposure to the world of exits.

It's a world occupied by a small few but accessible to many down this episode I get the pleasure of sitting down Hakey Haldrey is an awesome entrepreneur and we talk about his journey through selling to Rakutan.

And this is such a really unique story because Rakutan is an internationally well known company and just talking about the trials and tribulations of going from a small startup getting wrapped all the way up into a huge organization is really quite fun.

So I don't want to take away too much from the full conversation here but his current project called murals is really cool it's about groundbreaking machine vision technology that's really unique and it's a lot of fun he's also working on the exit Academy that is a really fun way of building startups to teach them how.

Exits happen and all that so really great entrepreneur so without further ado let's dive right into my detailed conversation here with Hakey Haldrey.

Alright everyone today I am joined by Hakey Haldrey and he is the founder of murals how's it going Hakey.

Thanks Steve very glad to be here. Yeah I'm excited to dig into your four exits but before we do get everybody excited about the number here I want to talk about your background what got you into business and entrepreneurship.

Yeah when I was in my first year of university my brother told me here's a table on the table there's a computer start working I don't care what you're going to do but do something so that was the start of my of my first company.

I don't care what you do but just just get started so what was the first company that you did.

You know the term Panama papers right they discovered about 10,000 companies there about 1000 of those were incorporated by me.

You know I was Estonia newly independent country a lot of customers for that type of stuff and honestly now I'm looking back it was a horrible thing to do.

I mean you are first year student and you start doing something like this it's absolutely nuts and I'm glad that I sold that company to some Luxembourg financial company and I got out of that space and never looked back.

So you were sort of creating these shell companies for was it high net high net worth or was it individual companies what were the main target customers.

Normally they would be a sign up to us individuals around in the politics countries.

Got it got it okay cool so you sold that to a Luxembourg company and was that you know was there a team associated with it was it just you and what did that deal look like.

I had a quick small company it was long time ago I think about eight people but the process of selling it was just me and my partner who went through this process and the back then we kept the whole process really secret from the rest of the team.

So the first time they knew about this was when I stepped in and said hey we've got new owners now.

No I wouldn't do this this way anymore. I would be much more transparent with my team.

Got it so eight people and the Luxembourg company did you have to go there did you have to be on the team there for a little while was there an urn out or was it just kind of all done.

They obviously had a bit of handcuffs but that one I got lucky it was just six months and then I was gone and I got my freedom to start my next next ventures.

Very nice very nice and when it came to that that deal was there like a broker did where they a customer of yours doing one of these these entity setups or how did they approach you how did those conversations begin.

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